Two Questions at the Heart of Bin Laden’s Jihad: Lawrence Wright

By Lawrence Wright -
Sep 8, 2011

When Osama bin Laden began his war
on America in 1996, he was posing two questions. The first was:
What is Islam?

Al-Qaeda’s definition of the faith is one that is
permanently in conflict with nonbelievers -- a category that
includes all Muslims who don’t subscribe to the narrow
fundamentalism of bin Laden and his cohort. Measured by its body
count, the real Clash of Civilizations was waged inside Islam
itself.

Al-Qaeda killed many times more Muslims in Iraq alone than
Americans who died on Sept. 11. That doesn’t count the Muslims
murdered by the group in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia, Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Afghanistan and elsewhere. In the name
of al-Qaeda’s vision of Islam, children have been turned into
suicide bombers, both Muslims and non-Muslims have been beheaded
(sometimes on video), women have had their faces burned off,
schools were destroyed, lovers stoned, aid workers murdered, and
the whole world held hostage to terror.

In the minds of many non-Muslims, Islam has become
synonymous with barbarism. Nothing said by more moderate Muslim
voices could compete with the appalling imagery put forward by
al-Qaeda’s terror masters.

Then came the Arab Spring.

To understand the scale of nonviolent sacrifice that
Muslims have endured in the pursuit of democracy and justice in
recent months, it is useful to look back at a similar time in
American history. There is a monument in Montgomery, Alabama, to
the martyrs of the civil-rights movement. Only a few of the 40
names on that memorial -- Emmett Till, Martin Luther King Jr.,
Medgar Evers -- are familiar to most Americans. The architecture
of civil-rights laws that arose from their sacrifice made
America a more just nation.

Compare those 40 names to the martyrs of the Arab Spring so
far: Some 200 died in the revolution in Tunisia. The death toll
in Egypt reached 840 during the 18 days of revolution. More than
a thousand have been killed in the youthful rebellion in Yemen.
So far in Syria, more than 2,200 lives have been lost.

These demonstrators are not marching into fire hoses or
police batons, like the brave marchers in Selma, Alabama, and
elsewhere in the civil-rights movement; they are facing tanks
and helicopter gunships. Some are killed randomly, others are
hunted down by secret police in their homes and even in
hospitals.

Most of the dead were nonviolent protesters or innocent
bystanders; a few were soldiers shot down by other troops when
they refused to fire on their fellow citizens. The protesters
are not just bringing about badly needed social revolutions in
their societies. By their moral example, they are redefining
Islam and redeeming it from the savage caricature that bin Laden
made of his religion.

The second question bin Laden posed was: What is America?

Bin Laden had a strategy when he attacked two U.S.
embassies in Africa in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000, and the World
Trade Center, the Pentagon and the failed attempt on the Capitol
Building on Sept. 11. He wanted to draw America into
Afghanistan, where he hoped and expected that the U.S. would
replicate the same catastrophe that befell the Soviet Union:
after 10 years of fighting on Afghan territory, the Soviets
withdrew and the Soviet Union proceeded to fall apart.

Bin Laden forecast the same fate for the United States: It
would become disunited states. The last remaining superpower
would disintegrate, leaving the way open for Islam to regain its
proper dominant role in the world.

Bin Laden never expected to defeat the U.S. militarily. His
intent was to open a gushing financial wound. The war in
Afghanistan will cost American taxpayers more than $100 billion
this year. The war in Iraq -- an unexpected bonanza for bin
Laden -- has so far reached $800 billion. Projections show the
cost of these wars reaching a trillion dollars each, more than
our total federal deficit.

The crippling economic effects of such vast expenditures --
not to mention the loss of American lives -- have not only
undermined our society, but also weakened our standing in the
world and diminished our future. This was bin Laden’s goal.

Al-Qaeda will fade away eventually. Perhaps with bin
Laden’s death in May, we have seen the dawning of that day. But
the security state that we have created to fight it will remain.
It is part of our economy, our laws, our culture and our image
now of who we are.

We have significantly enlarged the authority of our police
agencies at the expense of privacy and due process. We have
turned our back on our criminal justice system, which had done
an unparalleled job of prosecuting and convicting terrorists,
and forced those duties on the military, in secret courts. We
have expanded our intelligence agencies to the point that we now
patrol the entire world.

In waging this campaign against terrorism, Americans need
to realize that we have pushed aside some of the most valuable
weapons we have: our concern for human rights, for open
government and for fundamental standards of justice. Such rights
are rare in history and difficult to restore once they’ve been
lost. The actions we have taken in the “War on Terror” may
have made us safer. They have certainly made us a different
country.

But is it the country we want to be?

(Lawrence Wright is the author of “The Looming Tower: Al-
Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize
for general nonfiction. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this article:
Lawrence Wright at lawrencewright@me.com